Hundreds of homes destroyed: Spokane’s horrific wildfires could be preview for California
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Santa Monica Fire Department Deputy Chief Tom Clemo has barely slept since Saturday. He’s spent the last three days based in a high school in Spokane, Wash., leading a command post of crews assigned to the fires, which have destroyed roughly 700 structures and have remarkable similarities to the destructive firestorms that hit Los Angeles County in 2025.
“What we have been witness to and are managing now is a wind-driven brush fire that resulted in an urban conflagration in neighborhoods similar to [those in the] Palisades and Eaton [fires],” Clemo said. “They’re small in footprint but enormous in damage.”
Both the Spokane and Los Angeles wildfires ignited while a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” was in place, the most extreme wildfire warning issued by the National Weather Service. It means that low humidity, powerful winds and high temperatures are creating the perfect conditions for wildfires to spread voraciously.
Whipped by fearsome winds and fueled by a tinderbox of dry vegetation, three wildfires ignited on the edge of the wildland-urban interface in eastern Washington.
California firefighters like Clemo have joined the fight, which could offer a grim preview of what is ahead for California amid dry conditions and rising temperatures due to climate change.
The scale of destruction seems to be one of “hundreds and hundreds of homes,” Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson said.
With fires flanking Spokane to its north, east and west, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown called the fires “the worst natural disaster our region has faced.” The fires came as Spokane recorded its 10th-driest June on record, with just 0.26 of an inch of rain for the month — just 22% of normal, and as not a single drop of rain fell in July. The state of Washington has been in a statewide drought emergency since April 8 due to near-record-low snowpack.
UC climate scientist Daniel Swain called the trio of fires — now called the Spokane Area Fires — “the single most destructive fire in Washington state history.”
The devastation comes as extreme weather conditions across the American West are becoming ripe for intense wildfires should an ignition occur. For now, Swain said, it’s “the interior Pacific Northwest, where conditions are essentially verging on catastrophically bad,” but fire weather is also reemerging across swaths of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin.
California has managed to keep wildfires from descending into catastrophe so far this year. But “with upcoming heat and dryness in California, I do expect there to be a growing amount of fire activity in the coming days as fuels really dry out,” Swain said. Those fires will probably be kept to small or medium sizes, given a lack of the kind of strong winds and extreme fire weather conditions in California in the immediate forecast.
But “if we do get a big wind or lightning event, we are now set up with fuel dryness in California to have a much bigger wildfire outbreak,” Swain said.
The destruction is familiar to those in the L.A. region because, in 2025, residents lived it. The ongoing Spokane fires, like the Palisades and Eaton blazes, exploded near residential areas, during extreme fire weather on the heels of extremely dry winters.
Saturday marked the first time a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” fire weather alert had been issued in the state of Washington, and it went into effect between 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The fires started on Saturday around 3 p.m.
What made the forecast weather conditions particularly unusual for Saturday were the strong winds for late July and early August, meteorologist Steven Van Horn of the weather service’s Spokane office said in a briefing a day before the fires hit.
“And then the dry vegetation. This is also another really key factor here: that the fuels that we have across the region are very dry right now, very anomalously dry,” Van Horn said. “And that’s also another key factor with these PDS red flags — little to no rainfall in the past 39 days.”
Of the three fires now burning in the Spokane area, the Old Trails Fire — which burned through a swath of the city of Spokane — was the most problematic, Swain said.
“And of course there’s a severe to extreme drought,” Swain said. “And in this region, there’s a lot of open, discontinuous pine and other conifer forest at the edge of the city and in the intermix of the western side of the city. Fire ignited in that environment and rapidly progressed in alignment with the wind,” easily jumping over the Spokane River and heading straight into neighborhoods.
The Spokane-area fires, which have collectively burned more than 12,000 acres, aren’t particularly large by historical measures for the American West.
The Palisades and Eaton fires in L.A. County that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and Altadena collectively burned more than 38,000 acres, left 31 dead, and destroyed more than 16,000 homes, businesses and other structures; the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise in 2018 in Butte County burned more than 153,000 acres and destroyed more than 18,000 structures, killing at least 85 people.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is directing county agencies to form a plan to clear vegetation from lots burned in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Perhaps the clearest example of lessons learned from the Los Angeles fires was the haste with which local law enforcement worked to evacuate residents, Clemo said.
“The sheriff evacuated 60,000 people out of a portion of Spokane in a matter of two hours without injury or accident,” Clemo said. “That’s unbelievable.”
That the fire in Spokane spread rapidly during daylight hours may have aided public awareness.
Thus far there have been no fatalities reported in the Spokane fires, even though tens of thousands of people lived in the direct path of devastation.
The handling of evacuations emerged as a point of criticism in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires, which killed 31 people. This was especially the case in western Altadena, where alerts came hours after the blaze started and where almost all of the Eaton fire’s 19 deaths occurred.
Clemo also said that Washington worked hard to stage fire resources in response to the Particularly Dangerous Situation warning.
“There was an early call for a lot of resources and a lot of pre-positioning,” he said.
As bad as the fire was in Spokane, Swain said the fire could have been easily much worse had firefighters not waged a relatively effective battle against the blaze, including by dropping fire retardant from aircraft.
But firefighters were unable to control the fire from spreading directly in the direction of the wind, Swain said.
Once the wildfire entered urban neighborhoods, it became a purely urban firestorm, “and that’s a pattern we’ve become uncomfortably familiar with in recent years all throughout the West,” Swain said, “a city with large suburban development in high-risk zones, adjacent to some sort of highly flammable vegetation — in this case, it was coniferous trees, a pine forest — ... [and is] immediately upwind of an area that is inadequately prepared, from a wildfire-risk perspective, during a particularly critical fire weather period.”
A year after two of the most destructive wildfires in California history erupted, survivors commemorated the day in Altadena and Pacific Palisades with anger and remembrance.
Nearly 1,000 firefighters were on the ground Tuesday, a number that is expected to double in the coming days as mutual-aid crews continue to arrive — including hundreds of firefighters from California.
Clemo’s team is largely made up of firefighting personnel based in Southern California and the Central Coast, including members from Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has dispatched about 150 personnel and 20 engines to Washington, while individual California fire departments are also loaning crews.
The Los Angeles County Fire Department, for example, sent a 25-person camp crew and a three-person dozer team to the Spokane wildfires on Monday, according to a department spokesperson.
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services coordinated the deployment of four teams from the Los Angeles Fire Department, the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District, the Orange County Fire Authority and the Corona Fire Department.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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